Neverisms

One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.AYN RAND, in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Writing in an era when “being judgmental” was disparaged, Rand offered a powerful challenge, arguing that the very idea of neutrality in the realm of human behavior and moral values was “an abdication of moral responsibility.” As a replacement for the biblical precept “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” Rand suggested a pithy alternative: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

Never lose interest in life and the world.

Never allow yourself to become annoyed.JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

These were two of ten “Rules of Living” that the sixty-year-old Rockefeller formulated in 1899 (others included, “Get plenty of sleep” and “Don’t overdo things”). He guided his life by the rules until his death in 1937 at age ninety-seven.

Never be above asking for advice from those competent to give it . . .

and never affect to understand what you do not understand thoroughly.CHARLES ARTHUR RUSSELL,

Lord Chief Justice of England (1894–1900)

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore.ALBERT SCHWEITZER, in The Schweitzer Album (1965)

Schweitzer, one of the foremost ethical leaders of the twentieth century, added: “There is always something to make you wonder, in the shape of a leaf, the trembling of a tree.”

Never stagnate.

Life is a constant becoming: all stages lead to the beginning of others.GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,

in an 1897 letter to Ellen Terry

Here is a psychological suggestion for acquiring peace of soul.

Never brag, never talk about yourself,

never rush to first seats at table or in a theater,

never use people for your own advantage,

never lord it over others as if you were better than they.FULTON J. SHEEN, in On Being Human:

Reflections of Life and Living (1982)

Bishop Sheen added: “These are but popular ways of expressing the virtue of humility, which does not consist so much in humbling ourselves before others as it does in recognizing our own littleness in comparison to what we ought to be.”

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it;

never desert your line of talent.

Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.SYDNEY SMITH, quoted in Pushing to the Front,

an 1896 book by Orison Swett Marden

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself.

A man should never think that.

People will take you very much at your own reckoning.ANTHONY TROLLOPE, from a character in his

1864 novel The Small House at Allington

One must never let the fire go out in one’s soul, but keep it burning.VINCENT VAN GOGH,

in an 1878 letter to his brother Theo

Never let work drive you; master it and keep in complete control.BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, quoted in

Speeches of Booker T. Washington (1932)

Never dream of forcing men into the ways of God.JOHN WESLEY

Wesley, an Anglican clergyman who founded Methodism, added:Think yourself, and let think. Use no constraint in matters of religion. Even those who are farthest out of the way never compel to come in by any other means than reason, truth, and love.

Unlike so many of his fervid contemporaries, Wesley eschewed a doctrinaire approach to religion. He urged his followers: “Beware you are not a fiery, persecuting enthusiast.”

Never swallow anything whole.ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD,

in a 1944 conversation

“To swallow” literally means to ingest through the mouth and throat, but since the late sixteenth century has been extended to mean “to believe uncritically or accept without question.” This sense of the word shows up in sayings like “it was hard to swallow” or “he swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.” Whitehead added:We live . . . by half-truths and get along fairly well as long as we do not mistake them for whole- truths, but when we do mistake them, they raise the devil with us.

Albert Schweitzer was thinking similarly when he wrote: “To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason.”

Never love anything that can’t love you back.BRUCE WILLIAMS, American radio personality

This is one of Williams’s personal maxims—and a beautiful way of making the point that we should never place more importance on possessions than we do on people.

Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little

but needs that little so much.MARGARET WILLOUR, quoted in Reader’s Digest (1982)

Never let a crisis go to waste.FAREED ZAKARIA

Zakaria, an Indian-born American journalist and television news host, offered this in a December 2008 Newsweek essay. He may have been inspired by a remark made six months earlier by Stanford University economist Paul Romer, who piggybacked on the motto of the United Negro College Fund to observe, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The underlying idea also showed up in remarks made by Rahm Emanuel, the newly named White House chief of staff, shortly after the 2008 presidential election. In a New York Times column, Emanuel was quoted as saying, “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” All of these observations were stimulated by the financial meltdown occurring at the time, and they were all anticipated by a famous 1959 observation from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”

three

Never Give Advice Unless Asked

Advice

On January 24, 2005, William Safire wrote his final op-ed column for the New York Times. It had been thirty-two years since the former Nixon-Agnew speechwriter was asked to lend his voice to what he called “the liberal chorus” of the newspaper (one critic of the newspaper’s decision to hire Safire said that it was like setting a hawk loose among the doves). From 1973 to 2005, Safire wrote more than three thousand biweekly columns, winning the admiration of conservatives and the ire of liberals for speaking his mind and pulling no punches.

He also earned the respect of word and language lovers worldwide for his “On Language” column, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine from 1979 until his death in 2009 at age seventy- nine. For three decades, Safire built an immense fan base who treasured his weekly excursions into the origins of words, the meanings of phrases, and the role that language plays in our lives.